Friday, October 15, 2010

Upgrading a linode from an old version of ubuntu (8.10 Intrepid)

I was trying to upgrade my linode today, and I had one issue. I thought I'd share it for anyone else who got this error message on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

I read the linode library article about upgrading to 10.10, and for the most part it was applicable, but the advice to use the "Latest 2.6 Paravirt" kernel caused problems on 8.10. If I had left it alone, this problem wouldn't have happened.

When I switched over to that kernel and rebooted, my networking from within the linode to the outside world had stopped working. I didn't realise this immediately, because the websites were still working and I was able to ssl into the linode.

When I ran

do-release-upgrade -d

I got the following message:

no new release found

Simply switching the linode back to use the current stable version allowed me to upgrade to 9.04. From there on, the paravirt kernel worked fine.

By the way, switching kernels is done by clicking on the configuration profile on the dashboard of your linode.